When Tiffany Du Mouchelle was a young girl growing up in
suburban Michigan, she and her neighborhood friends would produce
backyard musicals. They’d sing along with cassette tapes of
the tuneful Andrew Lloyd Webber favorites “Cats” and
“Starlight Express,” making all their costumes and
sets, and choreographing all the moves.

“I remember our performances ran too late and went past my
bedtime,” says Du Mouchelle, adjunct assistant professor and
the new head of the Department of Music’s voice program. She
was 7 when her mother had to haul her out of the backyard
spotlight. “I had to go home and go to bed instead of finish
my performance.”

Her path has led to a naturally well-lighted office with a grand
piano in Baird Hall, where she balances teaching her students with
steady performance plans that continue UB’s tradition in new
music. That path, though, was anything but straight and smooth.
Wanting to sing and being able to sing are very different
things, Du Mouchelle says. She didn’t get into a university
voice program until several years after graduating high school.

She will never forget physically shaking with anxiety while
studying at both the New England Conservatory and the Longy School
of Music, often the youngest in her class. She could barely get
through the piece. She dedicated literally years to the hard work
that brought out her best voice, overcoming her inclination to hide
her real spirit and occupy the role of the dutiful student.

And then there was the kidney donation. When she was completing
her master’s, she learned her mother needed a new kidney to
survive. Du Mouchelle was a perfect medical match, but she faced
the possibility the serious operation could affect her voice or the
singing technique she was working so hard to perfect.

“The greater fear and more likely reality was that I could
lose my mother in a very short time,” says Du Mouchelle.
“I chose to respond in action to what I knew, rather than
what I didn’t.

Her mother is now 63, and her daughter’s kidney has been
“thriving” for almost seven years.

So it was anything but easy.

Nevertheless, that path from backyard songstress to Baird
Hall’s newest star in new music shared one constant: Du
Mouchelle loved the spotlight, with a passion for performing, for
seeing the loop between her audience and herself that left her with
that almost addictive feeling of sharing her music with others and
watching them respond.

“I love the stage,” says Du Mouchelle, now in her
second semester as head of the university’s voice program.
“It’s definitely where I love to be the most.

“I just can’t get enough of it. I don’t feel I
have to hide anything there. Whatever I put out there is exactly
what I’m supposed to do. Anything goes,” she says,
“especially when I am presenting programs of my own making. I
can put what I want out there and I don’t have to feel
censored in any way. I’ve worked really hard to open myself
up and be really honest. I’ve always felt more honest on the
stage,”

Throughout her career, Du Mouchelle struggled to channel that
creative experience of opening herself and losing that inhibiting
tension singers often endure. But once she got onstage, she found a
presence and confidence, the same intangible and instinct that led
her to reach the high E’s when singing Andrew Lloyd Webber as
a girl — a distant musical experience Du Mouchelle says gave
her courage to believe she might someday be an accomplished
singer.

“I would be completely open on stage,” says Du
Mouchelle, a French name from her father; her mother is Polish and
Ukrainian. “Everything would flow through me. My singing
would be so much easier. I felt I could connect with the text I was
singing. I felt like I had the right to do that when I was on
stage. I didn’t feel I had the right to do that when I was in
a lesson because I owed it to the composer and to my teachers to be
as perfect to the page, but not as perfect to the performance.

“I was much more appropriate to the piece when I was in
performance. Being on stage freed me.”

Du Mouchelle’s singing resume spans the globe, from the
residence of the U.S. ambassador to Egypt in Cairo, to the Skalholt
Summer Music Series in Iceland. Geography aside, Du
Mouchelle’s credits entail more music than could be covered
in this article, from musical theater and cabaret to genres most
people have never heard of. Her UB Department of Music biography
praises her “musical versatility,” “electric
stage presence” and “exceptional dramatic
sensibilities.”

“Most recognized for her fearlessness in exploring new and
challenging repertoire,” the biography reads, “she
ushers the voice into new realms of expressivity, including a vast
array of musical styles and languages, featuring 35 different
languages and exploring the genres of classical, world,
contemporary, cabaret and theatrical works.”

Her many credits and honors include the prestigious Richard F.
Gold Career Grant for American Opera Singers, performing at the
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Bang on a Can
All-Stars, at Disney Hall and at the New York Historical Society.
That’s such a limited list. There’s also performances
at the Acropolium in Carthage, Tunisia; serving as
soprano-in-residence at the Yellow Barn Music Festival; and the
Australian premiere of Stockhausen’s chamber opera
“Sirius” at the Bendigo International Festival of
Exploratory Music, to name a few.

“I’m a little sick of (Adele’s)
‘Hello’ because I’ve heard it a few too many
times,” says Du Mouchelle. “But I can sing along with
it.”

That trademark voice of hers is nothing short of remarkable,
especially heard from within the same room. It can be soft and
delicate, or it can bring to mind the power of famous female opera
stars. She can belt out a Broadway tune with the best of them. Or
she can use that theatrical experience and her expressive, Met
Opera-esque facial features to mold different sounds that are
beyond simple singing. Her diction and mechanics, two of Du
Mouchelle’s singing priorities, are always a prominent part
of her presentation. She can do “kulning,” a Swedish
yodeling technique that is a type of herding call.

Du Mouchelle also has performed Afghani songs called
“Speaking for the Afghan Woman” by William Harvey
featuring texts in Pashto and Dari. The texts in Dari are poems by
Afghan female poets, all of whom have been repressed from being
heard and have even been exiled or killed for speaking out.

Her faculty recital — to take place at 7:30 p.m. March 24
in Baird Recital Hall — features one piece called
“Lohn,” meaning “far away” or
“distant,” and comes from Occitan, the Old
Provençal language in which the text is sung.

She sang an excerpt a cappella (the translation: “Never
will I enjoy love, if I do not enjoy this distant love, for a
nobler and better one, I do not know anywhere. Neither near nor
far. So high is its true real price that there in the kingdom of
the Saracens I wish to be proclaimed her captive.”). Her
power and articulation and expression brings to mind an ensemble of
instruments, all coming from the same vocal chords.

“Compete with reverb immersed in the sound,” is how
she describes it. It’s environmental. A singer without Du
Mouchelle’s talent, dramatic pedigree and courage would be
well over her head.

The third piece of her recital, “Justice Arias,”
portrays aspects of the Greek heroine Clytemnestra as she
contemplates her husband’s return from the Trojan War before
she kills him in retribution for the death of their daughter,
Iphigenia. Du Mouchelle fuses what usually are two separate roles
— one of actress and one of the soprano — but maintains
separation with different articulation.

It all flows from that same source: the singer who declares she
might have started singing because she “just might have
wanted to be heard.”

“We all want to be heard in some way,” Du Mouchelle
says.

Singing is using energy in the right way, she adds.

“It’s very empowering. Someone who can open up and
make yourself be heard appeals to everything in life. A l0t of
people are driven to music because it is very therapeutic. To be
able to belt out something feels really good. You have to be
relaxed and open to making sound to successfully release sound.

“You have to release yourself to release the
sound.”

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